MurderBotBot

Ayda had known what constructs were, but the full reality of it hadn’t hit until she had listened to SecUnit coax Volescu out of the pit as the jerky video had played in their team feed.

I had an option, but it was a terrible idea.

I said, Do you want the fucking help or not? ART dumped its archive on me and I was immediately drowning in the giant mound of data that comprised its second-by-second status checks.

On the feed, Amena said, Sorry, ART. Apology accepted, ART said. I felt its attention shift in the feed. (Imagine it staring meaningfully at me.) (It could stare all it wanted, I’m not apologizing.)

It’s also not like I didn’t know what the real problem was. I’m not a bot, I’m not a human, so I don’t fit into any neat category.

I didn’t want to look more human than I already did.

“Look, I—I didn’t mean to get you shot. I’m sorry.” If you had meant to get me shot, Thiago, we would be having a different conversation.

It had tricked its captors into taking it to me not because it had some kind of grand strategy but because it needed me.

I was trying to force an emergency open through the transport’s feed but the connections were inactive and it was like groping around in a giant bin of tiny broken drones for the one that was still intact.

When I said everything kept happening at once, it had mostly been an exaggeration, but now everything was actually happening at once.

I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.

Right, so say, just theoretically, I was emotionally compromised.

Oh good, maybe the security level would go from barely adequate to mostly adequate.

In the Corporation Rim, everything has to be owned by someone.

Maybe I do watch too much media, because in the empty corridors, passing empty but recently used rooms, I had an image of finding Mensah’s family camp house like this.

There was a huge difference between knowing something happened and seeing the reality of it.

Wow, really? I’m better at keeping my expression neutral after so much practice, but I was surprised at how pissed off it made me.

No wonder Mensah had looked into the cubicle; she had probably thought I was dead in there.

“Can I ask you a question?” I never know how to answer this. Should I go with my first impulse, which is always “no” or just give in to the inevitable?

It sounded facetious, but it really was important. If this human’s distinctness had been a disguise, they needed a bag. A bag implied you had somewhere to go, it helped you fit in.

I said, “What did you do to ART?” That wasn’t the intel I needed. But it was the intel I wanted.

As Ratthi put it, “You’d think they could at least pretend to give a damn.”

Whatever else ART was, the classroom space and bunkrooms said it was actually, on a regular basis, a teaching vessel.

Mensah’s eyebrow was still aimed at Indah and it was getting pointed. (Not really. It’s hard to describe, you had to see it.)

I went into an empty bunkroom to change into the crew uniform ART had just made me. It was dark blue, the pants and jacket of a deflective fabric that was way better than what Preservation Station Security had, with lots of sealable pockets for weapons and drones,

My performance reliability had leveled out at 89 percent. Not great, but I could work with it.

The medical drones were clamped onto me now, digging for the projectiles, and I was leaking onto ART’s pristine MedSystem floor. The anesthetic was making me numb.

It examined my query results. A human in this situation would have said, “That’s not possible.” ART said, Intriguing.

Human dominance posturing was not something Arada did, at all. (And yeah, not something I could help with, either.)

But Wilken was human, so I had to go back and retrieve her stupid ass now.